


Boredom

by kalirush



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: And it takes a long time, Boredom, F/M, Figuring out what you want to do with your life is hard, ennui
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-26
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-25 20:06:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3823111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalirush/pseuds/kalirush
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mai was never going to be the kind of wife Zuko needed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boredom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CenozoicSynapsid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenozoicSynapsid/gifts).



> Not canon-compliant to the post-series comics...

It took nearly two years for Mai to get bored. 

First, there was all the chaos of the succession. Mai’s family showed up, looking a little shellshocked. Tom-Tom was happy to see her, anyway. People kept trying to kill Zuko, so that was fun. Nobody tried to tell her what to do, and that was more fun. 

(There was the one time that someone tried to kill _her_. That was strange. She’d expected him to go for Zuko, and had been surprised when he threw his knives at her instead. She’d ducked, of course. They’d all missed, except the one that caught her upper arm, which was both interesting and unpleasant. At least until it was boring.

The look on Zuko’s face caught her off guard. She might have expected the fear, but she wasn’t expecting the rage.)

About the time that Zuko had managed to purge the palace of the old-guard loyalists, she and Zuko started sleeping together. They started it partly because they _could_ , because who was going to tell the Fire Lord what to do? And her parents were pretty much not around, and anyway, they were so cowed by her proximity to Zuko that they weren’t going to argue.

It was mostly because people kept trying to kill Zuko, and he’d gotten himself stabbed when she wasn’t around. Sleeping in the same bed made things easier.

Then there was the sex. Mai found that she liked the sex. Zuko seemed to like it too.

She almost got bored after that. She couldn’t bring herself to care about affairs of state, and Zuko was gone most of the time. Ty Lee had gone off with the rest of the Kyoshi warriors, which was apparently the thing she was doing now. Ty Lee liked all that bonding and female friendship and things. 

(Mai went and talked to Azula, just to see what it was like. It was depressing. She just kept raving about how someone had turned Mai against her. She also kept talking to someone who wasn’t there. Azula had been a lot of things, but pathetic had never been one of them before.)

But then Zuko was back, and there was the sex again, and then she and Zuko were engaged. He asked, and she thought, _why not?_ and then her life became a whirlwind of things that apparently were supposed to happen when a reigning Fire Lord married for the first time. Which evidently hadn’t happened in living memory, since Fire Lords tended to be somewhat older when they ascended the throne. Mai didn’t actually kill any of the protocol masters, but she did consider it.

And then she and Zuko were fighting, in between the sex. Sometimes during it. She didn’t like it, but at least it wasn’t boring.

And then, two weeks before the wedding, she woke up and realized that she was bored. She looked around their chambers and thought she might drown if she had to wake up here, in this place, every morning for the rest of her life. Every time she’d been bored like this before, Azula had rescued her, and Azula wasn’t going to help her this time.

(Zuko came in while she was packing. His face went still, and she knew he understood that she was leaving. He tried to argue with her. He cried, tears running down his scarred face, and told her that he loved her.

“You don’t need me,” she said. “Anyway, I’m bored.” She did not cry.

She loved him, too. Her chest ached, watching him. But she was never going to be the kind of wife he needed, and she was pretty sure she didn’t really want to bear him heirs any time in the near future, and she had spent her entire life being what someone else- her parents, Azula, Zuko- wanted, and she was so bored of it that her entire _self_ ached.)

She thought she might visit Ty Lee in the Earth Kingdom. She knew that all that good will and camaraderie would make her want to puke before long, but at least it was something to do.

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t think boredom exactly is Mai's primary motivation. I think she doesn’t know what she wants, and that’s how she frames it to herself.


End file.
